Most polished and fun Musou game I've played in years. Story doesn't hang around too long, lots of stuff to do in history mode, runs great docked. Only real issues are probably that often enemy commanders have a lot of HP and there are too many sword-wielding Lords.

Better than I thought it was going to be. Definitely better than Dear Esther - this feels less of a piece that's only interested in atmosphere and more of a story with an actual point to make. Yes, the characters are all irritating idiots and yes, the world is clearly just a fixed stage that's been designed for you and you alone (seriously, putting a football on the ground in the game and making it a completely non-interactive, static object is one of the stupidest things you can do when designing a game), but the story was interesting and hunting down as many of the bits of dialogue as I could kept me entertained for a few hours.

I've lived in Shropshire all my life, though, and I've not got a fucking clue what Dan Pinchbeck used for reference material, because his version of Shropshire is almost completely alien to me.

OCT - Lego Ninjago Nindroids (Vita) (platinum trophy)

Ah, okay, now I see why people used to kick off about the Lego games on Vita. It was addictive enough to keep me going for the plat (mainly when when partner was playing something on the TV), but it's a pretty fucking dull game, all told. I guess it at least isn't as buggy as some of the others, but that'd have been inexcusable, considering how basic the game is and how little of the Vita's power it bothers to use.

The one thing I do want to say about this game is that the story makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever. Cutscenes bear no relation to the levels that preceed or follow them, and vice versa. I still have absolutely no idea what was supposed to be happening.

Was vacillating between 3 and 4 but that final encounter makes it a 3. The combat's pretty flawed; I think others have been through it but the feedback on being hit is awful (for some reason I'm reminded of the old 90s Tekwar game), the player's too fragile especially in the first two thirds of the game, you get the fun upgrades too late and it's very difficulty spikey. There don't seem to be as many opportunities for stealth kills as previously (or I'm just less patient). It also seems to be missing a level or two as it just kind of stops.

On the flip side, when you have enemies in front of you the dual wielding is still really fun, the upgrades are really nice when you get them and the heaviest weaponry has a good kick to it. The story and setting are the best part of it, simply because it's clear that the game is ready and willing to surprise you and anything can happen, both in terms of plot and setting. I can definitely say that there are some genuinely surprising parts and the story goes some places that you couldn't ever guess. Lots of shocks, lots of laughs and multiple cutscenes that I'll remember for a long time coming. I really hope they get to continue this as being able to start at full power from this and then carry on should help a lot with the problems I had with this one.

The PC port is pretty glitchy in parts. On a 1070/7700K setup I've had multiple crashes, sky box corruption and large explosions basically turn large parts of the screen black. This is with the latest Nvidia drivers, too. At least they sorted out the loading, though, as restarting is just a few seconds on my PC. I hear it's still pretty lengthy on console but a fast SSD seems to do the trick this time. It ran fine in terms of framerate but full-on graphic artefacting is pretty rare for an Nvidia card on an id engine.

Story's boring, characters are irritating but I can just turn off the sound and play. The gun handling is so good it feels like I'm cheating, the grenades have the exact right trajectory and getting around feels great. The PC version is pretty good - I had a couple of issues with framerate which were fixed with resets and one mission glitched out on me but overall it was a nice smooth experience. Just playing through the adventures on a map is really fun, dipping in and out of public events. In many ways for me it's the proper expression of what Borderlands promised. The original had disappointing solo play but I was much more satisfied with this one.